Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “While the elder Mr. Justice is certainly a bit darker than you, he was also very light-skinned for a black man. It’s difficult to be sure from the photo but his wife, Rebeckah—that’s her there—may have been a white woman. Desmond himself could be mistaken—or pass—for a Caucasian. Which means . . . Well, Mr. Astor—he’s the archivist—doesn’t think there’s any doubt.” A pause to let him consider the import. Ward Justice still said nothing. “He seems convinced he can trace your family tree to the Justices of Kingville and then back all the way to the Black Loyalists. Now, I guess what I wanted to ask you—”

  “Ms. Donovan,” Ward Justice cut her off then. “This is all . . . especially this,” he said pointing to the photo, “a surprise. I need some time to consider . . . I will answer any questions you want, but I’d like a little time.”

  She didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t in the scenario she’d written in her head. But he didn’t wait for her answer.

  “There’s something else, something I think that ties in with this . . . this information . . . that could make your story even more . . . interesting.” He paused, as if trying to figure out what and how much to say. “Can we—I know this is unusual . . . but then it’s all very unusual—can we go off the record . . . for a minute or two . . . while I put a proposition to you?”

  Moira’s instinct was to say no. She already had an “interesting” story. And she didn’t need Ward Justice begging her not to ruin his career with her revelations. She’d never developed the alligator hide she needed to be a reporter. She was afraid she might say yes. After all, Morton didn’t know what she had . . .

  “One minute,” Ward Justice was pleading. “Just one minute . . . and then . . . if you still want to . . . we’ll go back on the record and continue the interview.” He pointed at the microcassette recorder. She reached over, turned it off. What the hell?

  That’s when he made his pitch. The whole story, beginning to end, no questions unanswered, no pathway unexplored, no stone unturned, do with it as you wish. The only stipulation was that she wasn’t to publish a word of it until after he died. “Which”—and here he coughed a watery, wet cough, perhaps for effect—“will be sooner rather than later.”

  When he’d learned he was dying, he explained, he’d decided he needed to confess to some terrible things he’d done in his life, “starting with Rosa and the accident.” Moira hadn’t understood what he was talking about at the time. Ward was just assuming her father had already told her everything.

  Her request for an interview had started him thinking about asking her to be his confessional Boswell. “I was sure you knew some things from your father, but I never expected you would know so much,” he told Moira later—at a time when she was just beginning to realize how little she really knew.

  In the five months between that initial interview and the Judge’s death late last fall, she’d conducted more than forty hours of face-to-face interviews. Before he died, Ward had also prepared an all-purpose letter of introduction she could use in lining up her interviews. The letters explained that Moira was writing the story of his life, “warts and all,” and encouraged the recipient to co-operate fully.

  Some did. Moira interviewed Uhuru Melesse several times—before and after he legally changed his name back to Raymond Carter. During their last interview, he explained how he’d come to terms with Ward’s confession. “It took me a long time to sort this out and, even now, I know this is going to sound wrong,” he said, “but finding out what really happened was strangely liberating. Rosa was dead, Larry was dead. The guilt I’d been carrying around all those years, the regret . . . pointless now. Ward lived with the same kind of guilt, the same regret. And what good did it do him? He was dead now, too. But I was alive. I decided I had to go on living. That’s when I decided to change my name back, and when I decided to ask Shondelle to marry me.”

  Moira had already written that anecdote in the first draft of the book’s afterword. Unfortunately, so far, she’d only written that and the beginnings of the acknowledgements, which she kept on a file in her computer so she could update it after every interview—to make her feel as though she was actually accomplishing something. “I especially want to thank Raymond Carter, Shondelle Carter Adams, my father, Patrick Donovan, Victoria Justice, David Astor, INSERT ADDITIONAL NAMES HERE, all of whom gave generously of their time and then patiently responded to my many follow-up and often follow-follow-up questions . . .” She’d also already written another, all-purpose thank-you: “There were others, too, many of whom agreed to speak with me on condition that I not use their names in the text. They will know who they are, and I thank them for their assistance in preparing this manuscript . . .”

  Moira only wished there really were a manuscript. There were still too many holes in her knowledge, too many gaps in her understanding.

  Some people had refused to be interviewed. Desmond Justice wouldn’t speak with her at all. Neither would J. J. Howe, who told her that everything he had to say would be in his own book, publication of which was on hold while the Crown’s appeal—prosecutors claimed the judge had erred in law by allowing the justification defence—worked its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

  Kathleen O’Donohue, Ward Justice’s secretary during his years as a judge, declined Moira’s requests for an interview too, even after typing the Judge’s letter of support for her book. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t seem right to me to undermine the reputation of a man I admired, even at his own request,” she wrote in a letter to Moira shortly after the Judge’s death.

  Others, of course, couldn’t be interviewed. Rosa Johnstone, whose perspective would have been invaluable, was dead before Moira even knew she was alive. Dale “Junior” Eisner had died of a heart attack in 1989, shortly after Global Fisheries of Chicago bought his company for the same kind of fire-sale price Junior had once used to expand his own business interests. Junior’s company was among those caught by the collapse of the industry in the mid-eighties.

  Mr. Eisner’s executors refused Moira permission to examine his personal files. Using federal and provincial access to information legislation, she did get copies of some of his official correspondence with various governments, but those letters—compared to what she had learned about the man from other interviews—were blandly unrevealing and corporate.

  Perhaps most disappointing was the fact that she never had the chance to interview Jack Eagleson, Ward’s mentor, Ray’s benefactor and a dominating force in Nova Scotia business and politics for so many decades. As a result, there were many questions she could never resolve. Why, for example, had Eagleson chosen Ward Justice to be his protegé? Was he, as Ward himself told Moira, just one of many young men Eagleson had taken under his wing in hopes one would mature into a successful politician? Or had he seen something particular in Ward Justice? Moira would never know. Just as she’d never understand what was behind Eagleson’s complicated and puzzling relationship with the young Raymond Carter. Carter told her he now believed Eagleson’s actions were motivated both by genuine integrationist sentiments and also by white liberal guilt. “When he refused to publicly acknowledge me by taking me into his firm, even after he’d privately supported me all through law school, I think it represented an understanding—probably a correct understanding—of the limits of racial tolerance in Nova Scotia at that time. Although I didn’t think so then, I think now that Mr. Eagleson wanted to do the right thing but couldn’t bring himself to challenge a status quo he was very much part of.”

  There was one other question concerning Jack Eagleson’s role in the events of the summer of 1976 that Moira had wanted, tried—and ultimately failed—to answer. Did Jack Eagleson (and/or Junior Eisner) arrange the accident that cost Ward Justice his political career and—not to be too melodramatic—the possibility of a future life with Rosa?

  On the one hand, there was certainly evidence of Jack Eagleson’s Machiavellian tendencies. The
conspiracy-minded might see Ward Justice’s decision not to support Eagleson’s and Eisner’s scheme for a licence to operate a factory freezer trawler fleet—with its potentially huge payoff for their company—as a motive, even for murder.

  But there was one very practical conundrum. How could Eagleson (and/ or Eisner) have orchestrated events so little Lawrence would be in the parking lot in the middle of that night?

  “That is really far-fetched,” Ward Justice himself told Moira when she put the theory to him. Although Ward insisted he had no memory of what happened that night, he never denied being solely responsible for the death of Rosa’s son. “My own best guess now,” he told Moira in one of their last interviews, “is that what happened was an accident . . . an accident that was entirely my fault . . . and Jack and Junior took advantage of that.”

  That much was true. The new Fisheries minister—not coincidentally—supported Eisner Fisheries International and helped grease the political wheels of Ottawa’s approval of its application for a factory freezer trawler fleet.

  And there was evidence Eagleson had orchestrated the events that unfolded after the accident, too. Moira knew, for example—from an interview she’d done with Charles O’Sullivan, Rosa’s Boston employer—that Jack Eagleson personally made the arrangements for him to hire Rosa and bring her to Boston. “I’d had a call a few days before from my cousin Seamus, telling me Mr. Eagleson would be calling and urging me to do whatever I could to assist him with a ‘delicate’ matter. No one ever told me why the matter was delicate, although I guess I always assumed that Seamus himself had had a . . . relationship with Rosie and his wife found out, or some such. Whatever it was, I must say that I personally never had one day’s regret over the decision to hire Rosie.”

  Moira had uncovered one more intriguing fact, which suggested that, at the very least, Jack Eagleson took advantage of Ward Justice’s unfortunate accident. In 1976, Eagleson told Ward Justice—who eventually told Moira—that Ward had to decide immediately whether to accept the judicial appointment because a reporter named Patrick Donovan was about to break the story of Ward’s liaison with Rosa Johnstone and his role in her son’s death.

  This came as a shock to Moira’s father. He didn’t even recall covering the original accident until Moira showed him a copy of the brief from the newspaper. “Oh Christ, that. I just remember I’d spent the day before drinking, got into trouble with your mother and then got called to go out before it was decent the next morning to cover it. It wasn’t any big deal. I did it and forgot it.”

  And he remained adamant that he knew nothing about Ward Justice’s role in the accident; he certainly wasn’t about to publish an exposé, as Eagleson had suggested. “I wish I was. Who knows? Maybe things would have turned out differently for me if I’d ever broken a story like that. Maybe I’d still be a journalist instead of . . . doing what I’m doing now.”

  What Patrick Donovan was doing now—more happily, Moira knew, than that quote would suggest—was taking care of Moira’s son, his grandson and namesake.

  When Moira told him she was quitting the paper to write a book about the case, Patrick tried to talk her out of it. “Why don’t you just write a magazine article?” he suggested. “It’ll pay more, and it would take less time, and you wouldn’t have to quit just when you’re so close to becoming an editor.” When he realized she was going to quit anyway, however, Patrick was quick to offer his support—and his willingness to take care of her little boy while she wrote. At first, Moira was reluctant—“Remember, I experienced your parenting skills once already”—but then she had to call on him temporarily a few months later after Moira’s Thai babysitter abruptly quit and moved to Toronto to be closer to her ailing mother. Things turned out so well—“I guess I learned all the things not to do when you were a little girl,” Moira’s father told her—that she soon stopped looking for a replacement.

  While Moira wrote each morning in her home office, actually a tidy corner of her apartment’s master bedroom, Patrick the Old and Patrick the Young became inseparable. Moira, of course, was still available for mama emergencies and even the occasional cheerleading. Last week, her father had yelled for her to come quickly to witness Patrick’s first ever whiz in his potty. They’d clapped so loudly they distracted him. He turned to see what the fuss was about and peed all over the bathroom floor.

  Moira’s father did not clean up the mess. But he was unstinting when it came to making sure Patrick the Young was educated in what he considered important matters. Each morning he read aloud to his grandson all of the stories on the front page of each of the local newspapers, and then engaged him in what turned out to be a largely one-sided discussion of their merits, or lack thereof.

  Patrick himself saw few merits in either paper. “But that doesn’t mean journalism has to be this way,” he would insist to Moira’s uncomprehending two-year-old. “Journalism, done right—the way you’ll do it—is a sacred calling.”

  Moira knew her father was proud she was writing a book, but book writing was clearly a lesser calling than newspapering. “You could have been a great editor,” he told her often, but he’d given up on rescuing Moira from her weaknesses and had moved on to preparing his grandson to take his rightful place in the world. Which was okay with Moira, too.

  “The story has been changing shape ever since . . .” Moira reread the words on the screen one more time, and continued typing.

  Acknowledgements

  There was a real community called Africville, and much of the awful tale of its destruction happened as I have described it. Former residents—in fact as well as in fiction—have filed a civil suit seeking compensation for the loss of their community. And a recent United Nations’ report really did urge the Canadian government to offer reparations to the displaced families.

  There are other verifiable facts in this fiction, too. We now know the RCMP did follow and compile dossiers on local black activists during the 1960s and 1970s. We know large fishing companies did lobby governments in the lead-up to Canada’s declaration of the two-hundred-mile limit to give them licences to operate factory freezer trawlers. And we know there really was a Liberal government in Nova Scotia during the 1970s, albeit not the one I have described.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Raymond Carter /Uhuru Melesse exists only in my imagination. So does Ward Justice. And Jack Eagleson. And Junior Eisner. And Moira Donovan. And virtually all the rest of my cast of characters. The details of the situations I put them in, of course, are invented as well.

  During the course of researching, thinking and writing, however, many people helped me to understand what really happened—or could have happened—so I was better able to bend and shape that reality to fit my fictional purposes.

  Lisa Taylor, a friend, lawyer and former host of the CBC-TV series The Docket, read early drafts of the manuscript and offered many helpful editorial as well as legal suggestions. So too did Molly Kalkstein McGrath, another good friend and wise editor. Carol Aylward, who taught critical race theory at the Dalhousie Law School, suggested ways in which Uhuru Melesse might try to mount a reparations defence for J. J. Howe. So did Wayne MacKay, a friend and expert on criminal procedure. Andrea MacDonald, a reporter for the Halifax Daily News) walked me through a day in the life of a real court reporter. Brian Flemming, an expert on the law of the sea who served as a policy adviser to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau from 1976 to 1979, helped me navigate the actual ins and outs of Canada’s 1977 decision to declare a two-hundred-mile territorial limit.

  Others helped too, often without knowing it. I drew heavily on writer Charles Saunders’s vivid reconstruction of everyday life in Africville in the book The Spirit of Africville when I began to paint my own picture of community life. And, in my role as a journalist, I had interviewed Irvine Carvery, the president of the Africville Genealogy Society, many times. Irvine’s loving descriptions of growing up in Africville and his conti
nuing, passionate commitment to winning justice for the former residents helped inspire this book.

  I thank them all for making the book better for their input, and absolve them all of any responsibility for its imperfections.

  I also want to thank Anne McDermid, my agent; Iris Tupholme, my editor at HarperCollins, who took a chance on this book when it was little more than an idea and a few sample chapters; Catherine Marjoribanks, my copy editor; and, of course, as always, my wife, Jeanie.

  STEPHEN KIMBER

  Halifax

  May 2005

  About the Author

  Stephen Kimber is a bestselling, award-winning writer, editor, broadcaster and professor in the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. He is the author of five non-fiction titles, all set in Halifax, including Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War and Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash. Visit his website at www.stephenkimber.com.

  Copyright

  Reparations © 2006 by Stephen Kimber & Associates Ltd. All rights reserved.

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